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Unsure whether this particular Wikipedia entry was posted one April 1st, but here goes . . . .
Bottle-kicking is an old Leicestershire custom that takes place in the village of Hallaton each Easter Monday. The event starts with a parade through the village, where a large hare pie and three "bottles" (actually small kegs, two of beer and the third, called "the dummy", made of solid wood) are carried.
The pie is blessed by the Hallaton vicar before being cut apart and thrown to the crowd for the "Hare Pie Scramble". The rest is placed in a sack to be carried up the nearby Hare Pie Hill.
3:15pm marks the kick-off of the bottle-kicking game, for which there are virtually no rules, except no eye-gouging, no strangling, and no use of weapons. Each bottle is then tossed in the air three times, signalling the start of the competition. Each team tries to move the bottles, on a best-of-three basis, across two streams one mile apart, by any means possible.
The contest is a rough one, with teams fighting to move the bottles over such obstacles as ditches, hedges, and barbed wire. The game ends with the bottles (kegs of beer) being opened and consumed and subsequent refreshments at the village pub.
A similar medieval traditional game is the Royal Shrovetide Football Match played annually on Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday in the Derbyshire town of Ashbourne.
Bottle-kicking is an old Leicestershire custom that takes place in the village of Hallaton each Easter Monday. The event starts with a parade through the village, where a large hare pie and three "bottles" (actually small kegs, two of beer and the third, called "the dummy", made of solid wood) are carried.
The pie is blessed by the Hallaton vicar before being cut apart and thrown to the crowd for the "Hare Pie Scramble". The rest is placed in a sack to be carried up the nearby Hare Pie Hill.
3:15pm marks the kick-off of the bottle-kicking game, for which there are virtually no rules, except no eye-gouging, no strangling, and no use of weapons. Each bottle is then tossed in the air three times, signalling the start of the competition. Each team tries to move the bottles, on a best-of-three basis, across two streams one mile apart, by any means possible.
The contest is a rough one, with teams fighting to move the bottles over such obstacles as ditches, hedges, and barbed wire. The game ends with the bottles (kegs of beer) being opened and consumed and subsequent refreshments at the village pub.
A similar medieval traditional game is the Royal Shrovetide Football Match played annually on Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday in the Derbyshire town of Ashbourne.
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], though it is of course outside the scope of the game as such. Both villages had, at "rail peak", stations on the Great Northern / LNW joint system which served these parts. This system then carried a [sparse] passenger service between Peterborough [North] and Leicester [Belgrave Road]: running essentially over the LNW Peterborough -- Rugby line as far as Drayton Junction a few miles east of Market Harborough; then onto "joint" metals, over what must have been one of Britain's longest "curves" or "chords": a couple of miles north-westward to just short of Hallaton station on the joint system's south-to-north "main line"; and including the station of Medbourne. The trains then continued north to the Marefield or Lowesby triangle, and on to the branch which took off westward from there, to terminate at Leicester [Belgrave Road]. This wondrous service was withdrawn in 1916 as a wartime economy measure, and was never reinstated; I believe that from that date, the Drayton Jun. -- Hallaton section was abandoned.)
